Good causes are handed £1m to help London's vulnerable

Photo credit, Nigel Howard

Dozens of grassroots charities tackling social exclusion across London have been awarded grants in a £1 million payout from the Evening Standard Dispossessed Fund – taking the total given out by the fund to a record £11.3 million.

Today’s bonanza is from our partnership with Comic Relief, which this year encouraged Londoners to take part in Sport Relief. It marks the fifth time they have allocated a million pounds to the Dispossessed Fund.

The selected charities – 68 in all – have been awarded grants of £5,000 to £20,000 and were chosen for the transformative work they are doing to help the most vulnerable Londoners. The charities we have backed are wide-ranging and will use the grants for innovative projects that help people get back into work or education, address pensioner isolation, tackle gangs and knife crime and homelessness.

The total disbursement of £11.3 million is the most money ever given out by a newspaper-led charity and marks the Evening Standard as a key supporter of grassroots philanthropy in London and an influential driver of social change.

Kevin Cahill, chief executive of Comic Relief, the organisation behind Sport Relief, said: “Thanks to our partnership with the Evening Standard – and the generosity of its readers - Comic Relief has been able to award a million pounds to grass roots organisations in London through the Dispossessed Fund. The fund enables us to support fantastic projects like the Doorstep Homeless Families Project in Camden, which provides support to children in homeless families, and The Bike Project, which provides refugees with bicycle repair training and equipment to help them integrate into London and have a cheap way to travel. All the projects supported offer a vital lifeline. We are very proud to support such life changing work.”

Our latest grants round was three times oversubscribed with a short list of 100 charities being whittled down to 68 winners in a five-hour Dispossessed Fund panel meeting attended by representatives of the Evening Standard, Comic Relief and The London Community Foundation, the charity that manages our fund. This shortlist had been selected from 310 groups across 31 boroughs whose grant applications were initially assessed by The London Community Foundation. To be eligible, the group’s annual income could not exceed £250,000.

The Dispossessed Fund has raised £16 million since it was set up in 2010, of which £3.6 million is invested in an endowment. So far 1,086 grants have been awarded, helping more than 150,000 people across the capital.